It’s Hammer the Backlog time! That’s right! High energy this week. High speed, low drag!
Ok, I’ll take it down a notch. Welcome back to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly warhammer mini painting, productivity and accountability blog. I’m trying to get 30 years of hoarded tabletop minis painted to a standard that I’m happy with, saving them for the purgatory of being still on sprue, or worse still, built and not painted.
The quarter continues to go surprisingly smoothly with the genestealer cult being both a lot easier and more fun to paint than expected.
Let’s take a look at this week’s scorecard, the models and then any other business.
SCORECARD
The first bit of red in the ledge for a long time this week.
The genestealer cult project continues to go well, despite me doing something I have never done before in Hammer the Backlog, going back to a finished model and changing it.
I wasn’t very happy with the hybrid from last week, with his purple flesh looking too much like a purestrain genestealer for my tastes. So I broke from tradition and went back and redid the flesh colours. I’ll save the pure purple for the purestrains coming up in the next few weeks.
The progress track puts this week as 40% done. That feels about right to be honest. And after next week the “rank and file”, if you can use that term for hideous mutant freaks, are done, meaning it’s all special units, monsters and characters from here on out. Maybe I won’t need that week to have a mental breakdown after all?
The red in the ledger comes from the fact that I can’t find anywhere online where people care to see these very much! Unlike, say, Bretonnians or empire, the internet is particularly swarming with groups of people who want to see decently, but not spectacularly, painted models from 8 years ago.
But remember, internet kudos is not the main point of Hammer the Backlog! With the Deathwatch done and being nearly halfway on the Genestealer Cults, we are tantalisingly close to having another boxed set ticked off.
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
Five more hybrid acolytes this week. Unlike the more human looking ones, I find it quite tricky to tell the first and second generation hybrid acolytes apart. They do, after all, have faces that only a mother could love. No seriously, that’s part of the lore. Look it up.
Surprisingly, the only real difference between the more human looking guys and these is that they have a lot less cloth, and a lot more chitinous exoskeleton. That meant less thunderhawk blue to paint, and a bit more time spent on getting my genestealer blue recipe down.
In the end I went with a base coat of leviathan blue, washed with nuln oil. Then I used kantor blue to bring back up any areas that got too washed out. I highlighted with Alaitoc blue, and an edge highlight with Hoeth Blue, followed by a spot of blue horror.
This is the basic recipe I’ll be using on the purestrains too, as well as the broodlord in a few weeks.
One question that popped up this week was were exactly are these guys getting their organic blades? I’d be willing to accept that the organic looking knives were made from shed class, for example. I’ve even painted them as such.
But where did the knives with the eyes come from? Aren’t they more of a pure tyranid thing than a genestealer cults thing?
The skin was quite tricky. After being unhappy with the purple from last week, I wanted to be on the pale flesh to pink to purple spectrum. This was done with a combo of fyreslayer flesh, magos purple and volupus pink contrast. I then highlighted up with very light glazes of pallid wych flesh. Took a while, but looks suitably blotchy and alien and horrible I think. All five are also subtly different.
Lookit gang, that’s more than enough out of me for one week!
See you next week for the last five rank and file gibblies.
Hammer the Backlog 
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